O'Donnell: 'Witch' was the worst

Christine O’Donnell reveals in her new book that the “lowest moment” of her failed 2010 Senate campaign came when the Delaware Republican made the now-infamous assurance to voters: “I am not a witch.”

Writing in her memoir, “Troublemaker: Let’s Do What It Takes to Make America Great Again,” set to be released on Tuesday, the tea party-backed former candidate says she never wanted to make the ad but was urged to do it by an insistent media consultant.

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“It was a wrong-headed move, made for all the wrong reasons, but it was mine,” O’Donnell writes, according to The Associated Press, which bought a copy of the book Thursday.

While O’Donnell is at times harsh on herself, her toughest words in the book are for fellow Republicans, the AP said.

Former Rep. Mike Castle, the candidate she upset in the GOP primary, was so determined to stop her that he urged supporters not to back her in a previous campaign. Castle denies doing so.

“This type of strong-arm politics was to be expected, I guess, but to be undermined by my own party? It was maddening,” she writes.

O’Donnell also criticizes former George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove, saying that he betrayed Republican values for political gain.

Rove was a leader of the “liberal influences” that “severely tarnished Bush’s legacy among true Constitutionalists,” she says. “It was Karl Rove’s style of Machiavellian, unprincipled realpolitik that destroyed the Republican brand.”

The “witch” ad, later parodied on “Saturday Night Live,” was “my lowest moment of the 2010 campaign,” O’Donnell writes.

The decision to create the ad came after a clip from the 1990s in which she said she “dabbled” in witchcraft as a teenager was posted on the Internet last fall, though O’Donnell contends that it was leaked before she had seen or approved it.

The consultant who O’Donnell says urged her to create the ad, Fred Davis, responded to her claims in an email message to the AP on Thursday. “I wish her well with her book, and her future,” he said. “That was a very unusual campaign.”

Emails obtained by the AP show that the campaign had approved of the ad and had planned to post it on YouTube the same morning it began airing on TV. In one note to Davis, campaign manager Matt Moran commended the consultant on his work, saying, “Solid message, Fred,” and copying O’Donnell on the note.

On Thursday, Moran said he disagreed with Davis’s media strategy at the time and wanted to target O’Donnell’s Democratic opponent. His praise for Davis, he said, was in part sarcastic. “It was very chaotic. We had only one ad in the can,” he said, and had already bought airtime.